Eyes full of Fireflies: Our first look at the Amazon Fire Phone

Gallery: Take a visual dive into Dynamic Perspective, UI of Amazon's first smartphone.

After officially unveiling the Amazon Fire Phone, the Seattle company invited us to its headquarters down the road, where they let us go hands-on with new, unique features like Dynamic Perspective and Firefly. We took the opportunity to fill our camera's memory card with photos of the phone and its UI. So in addition to some thoughts from our time using the device (coming soon), this gave us an opportunity to provide a quick visual tour.

One of the animated lock screens.

One of the animated lock screens.

Another animated lock screen.

This demo app required tracking my face to work; it didn't merely rely on gyroscope data, which made taking video of this (and other Amazon Fire Phone functionality) quite difficult.

Stagedive Legends received the Amazon Fire Phone treatment, allowing players to control their floating character with head nods, but the lag was noticeable enough to make this an unappealing method almost immediately. Plus, it hurt our necks.

More Stagedive Legends.

Slightly tilting the phone to either side, which Amazon called "peeking," brought up little tooltips on a map search.

Without the peek.

Peeking again.

Sharply tilting the phone to the left in the main menu brought up this shortcut list.

Sharply tilting the phone to the right brought up notifications and other standard alerts, like weather data.

Zillow demo.

Sam Machkovech

Firefly demonstration, in which we try to pull up book and CD covers along with phone and URL info from posters.

Firefly listened to a snippet of the first Hobbit film and picked out exactly which scene we were watching.

It's thinking...

We held our own phone up to play songs in an attempt to trip up Firefly. It couldn't figure out "Red, Red, Red" by Fiona Apple, but it fared better with Dean Martin.

The keyboard includes Swype functionality, but our representative clarified that, at the moment, no third-party keyboards will be supported by Amazon Fire Phone.

Amazon

We tested the Mayday button, and a live representative from Amazon popped on to assist, though the video portion was off sync with the audio. The Mayday assistant could mark anything on my screen with yellow-chalk outlines when I faked like I was confused. The assistant walked me through attaching a new photo to a text message. (This promotional photo is cleaner but otherwise indicative of our experience.)

This was the dumb photo text we sent after getting help from Mayday.

In the Contacts app, I hard-tilted the phone to the right to bring up my "VIP" contact list.

Another motion-sensitive lock screen.

Micro-USB! Twin speakers!

Sam Machkovech

Compared to our ancient Galaxy S3 that we had on hand, the Amazon Fire Phone is noticeably thick.

Sam Machkovech

Banners went up outside the press conference as soon as the phone had been revealed.

Sam Machkovech

Another banner that went up as soon as the Amazon Fire Phone was revealed.

Sam Machkovech

After the Amazon Fire Phone reveal, Amazon served narcissistic cookies to the gathered media.